Poseur:Elie
Wiesel, survivor; author of book: "Night",
about his horrible sufferings at the hands of the
Nazis; speaking fee: $25,000 per lecture plus
chauffeur-driven car

[All
pictures added by this website]

February 19, 2001

MINORITY
REPORT

Wiesel Words

by CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

IS THERE a more contemptible poseur
and windbag than Elie Wiesel? I suppose
there may be. But not, surely, a poseur and windbag
who receives (and takes as his due) such grotesque
deference on moral questions. Look, if you will, at
his essay on Jerusalem in the New York Times of
January 24.

As a Jew living
in the United States, I have long denied myself
the right to intervene in Israel's internal
debates.... My critics have their conception of
social and individual ethics; I have mine. But
while I grant them their right to criticize,
they sometimes deny mine to abstain.

Such
magnificent condescension, to grant his critics the
right. And it is not certain from when Wiesel dates
his high-minded abstention from Israel's internal
affairs; he was a member of Menachem Begin's
Irgun in the 1940s, when that force employed
extreme violence against Arab civilians and was
more than ready to use it against Jews. At all
events, his dubious claim above is only a pompous
preface to discarding nonintervention in the
present because Jerusalem is at stake, and "the
fact that I do not live in Jerusalem is secondary;
Jerusalem lives within me." (Again the modesty.)
There are, sad to say, serpents in Wiesel's
internal Eden, and they too must be patronized:

That Muslims
might wish to maintain close ties with this city
unlike any other is understandable. Although its
name does not appear in the Koran, Jerusalem is
the third holiest city in Islam. But for Jews,
it remains the first. Not just the first; the
only.

"Might wish." "Ties." "Understandable." "Third
holiest." Even these lordly and dismissive gestures
clearly cost Wiesel something. After all, he
announces that the city is "mentioned more than 600
times in the Bible," which (assuming for a moment
that one ought to think like a religious
fundamentalist in the first place) would give a
Christian Arab -- these being at least 15 percent
of the Palestinian population -- quite a strong
claim on the old place. (Incidentally, let me ask
any reader how often the city is mentioned in the
Torah.) But for Wiesel all Arabs are Muslims, and
even if they happen to live in Jerusalem, this is
nothing to the way that Jerusalem dwells within
Wiesel. Indeed, it would evidently dwell more
comfortably within him if they did not live in it
at all. Do I exaggerate? I don't think so. In a
propaganda tour of recent history, he asserts that
in 1948, "incited by their leaders, 600,000
Palestinians left the country convinced that, once
Israel was vanquished, they would be able to return
home."

This
claim is a cheap lie and is known by Wiesel to be a
lie. It is furthermore an utterly discredited lie,
and one that Israeli officialdom no longer cares to
repeat. Israeli and Jewish historians have exposed
it time and again: Every Arab broadcasting station
in the region, in 1947 as well as 1948, was
monitored and recorded and transcribed by the BBC,
and every Arab newspaper has been scoured, and not
one instance of such "incitement," in direct speech
or reported speech, has ever come to light. The
late historian and diplomat Erskine Childers
issued an open challenge on the point as far back
as the 1950s that was never taken up and never will
be. And of course the lie is a Big Lie, because
Expulsion-Denial lies
at the root of the entire problem and helps poison
the situation to this day. (When Israel's
negotiators gingerly discuss the right of return,
at least they don't claim to be arguing about
ghosts, or Dead Souls.)

In a brilliant reply to Wiesel published in
Vesti, Israel's largest Russian-language paper,
Israel Shamir compares him rather leniently
not to Jabotinsky but to the Knight of the Doleful
Countenance and his mad quest for purity:

Be reasonable,
old man. Stay within the frame of the story and
within the bounds of common decency. Don
Quixote did not drive his jeep into Toboso
to rape his old flame. OK, you loved her, and
thought about her, but it does not give you the
right to kill her children, bulldoze her rose
garden and put your boots on her dining-room
table.

Shamir speaks of the beautiful city that
Palestinians centuries ago "adorned with a
magnificent piece of jewelry, the Golden Dome of
Haram al-Sharif, built their houses with pointed
arches and wide porches, and planted cypresses and
palm trees." He's wasting his time on Wiesel, who
says that Palestine was a desert before he arrived
there as one of Begin's thugs, and who slanders the
people he helped dispossess, first by falsely
saying that they ran away from their beloved
ancestral hometown and second by disputing their
right even to feel nostalgia for it.

In
1982, after Gen. Ariel Sharon had treated
the inhabitants of the Sabra and Shatila camps as
target practice for his paid proxies, Wiesel
favored us with another of his exercises in
neutrality. Asked by the New York Times to comment
on the pogrom, he was one of the few American Jews
approached on the matter to express zero remorse.
"I don't think we should even comment," he said,
proceeding to comment bleatingly that he felt
"sadness -- with Israel, and not against Israel."
For the victims, not even a perfunctory word.

As I write, it looks as if the same Sharon will
become Israel's prime minister. If you recall, he
occupied West Beirut in September 1982, after the
assassination of the Maronite Prime Minister
Bashir Gemayel, on the announced and highly
believable pretext that Palestinian civilians would
need protection from Phalangist reprisal. He then
sent into their undefended camps the most extreme
faction of the Phalangist militia and backed up the
dirty work of these notorious fascists with flares
during the night, and rear-guard cover during the
day, for thirty-six hours before having them
escorted out in triumph and thanked for their work.
In other words, the bulk of US overseas military
aid is about to be lavished on a man who stood with
hands on hip, in belt and boots and steel helmet
and binoculars, and saw a mound of human corpses
rise, and who thought it good. For this outcome,
the soil has been manured by the beautiful thoughts
of Elie Wiesel.

Website footnote:
Elie Wiesel even
claims to be one of these prisoners at
Buchenwald.
The US Signals Corps picture was posed by US
troops soon after they entered the Buchenwald
camp near Weimar. Have readers any information
on the picture? []
Alan
Heath
(of Poland) responds (9.2.01): "The person in
the top right hand corner whose face only is
visible is Mel Mermelstein who recalls
how it was taken in his book By Bread Alone."
Our comment: Mermelstein and Wiesel both
claim to have shared bunks at Buchenwald? Some
people just want to be the corpse at every
funeral and the bride at every wedding.